Ding Dong! The ALST at LAST is Dead!

That’s right, be happy/sad that you have likely wasted more money on a certification test that made you feel frustration, rage, and righteous indignation. At least the Regents have been listening to the chorus of protests from all corners of the state, and it seems there is likely to be some more wiggle room coming our way on the edTPA. 

Meanwhile, lost in all the crazy news coming from Washington DC, is the move by Congress to undo much of the ESSA (see New York Times story here). The teacher preparation regulations are gone, and AACTE seems pretty happy about that. Once the new law is signed by you-know-who, it’s likely to create confusion at the state level because, in Chris Minnich’s words quoted in the Times, “the states are planning and doing stuff.” Disruption, chaos, all against a backdrop of the depressing testing season, declining enrollments in teacher preparation programs, rising class sizes, you name it.

But I have to leave you on a happy note. Listen to this magnificent rendition  of You Raise Me Up with the amazing PS22 Chorus and Celtic Woman and have a happy Saint Patrick’s Day.

Whac-A-Mole

If you feel that the nation is playing political Whac-A-Mole one tweet or headline at a time lately, you’re not alone. Here in New York, those attempting to become teachers have been feeling that way for some time with the policies coming from Albany regarding teacher certification exams. In the latest round, the task force recommendations have been released, but you probably didn’t even know there was an edTPA task force. This sort of important work is buried in the Regents’ meeting minutes:

“Commissioner Elia gave an update on Regent Cashin’s work with the edTPA Task Force. The Task Force is reviewing current regulations and practices related to the edTPA, the literacy requirement, and student teaching requirements.” (from December 2016)

The committee made the following proposals to fix myriad problems (the memo from D’Agati is here):

1.        Convene a standards setting committee to review and potentially recalibrate edTPA score requirements;

            What this means is they may lower the cut score and raise it incrementally (as they are doing in the state of Illinois where a passing score is currently 35. In New York it’s 41).

2.        Establish a multiple measures review process so a teacher candidate who fails the edTPA within a narrow margin may be recommended for certification by program faculty based on other evidence of readiness to teach;

            Apparently highly qualified, award-winning teacher candidates are capable of not passing the edTPA, and institutions have no recourse other than to recommend resubmission to Pearson. This would give some control back to colleges, but it could be murky as to how that would work exactly. Coupled with a lowering of the cut score, even temporarily, there is likely to be political grandstanding on this issue.

3.         Work with teacher educators to review edTPA handbooks of concern, with two possible outcomes:

—    Handbook revision, or

—    SED approval of an alternative performance assessment when a mismatch occurs between the edTPA and professional practices in a particular teacher education specialty area;

            This is about those edTPA exams that are in specialist areas, most notably special education, library science, foreign language, and performing arts. I don’t think they really plan to just revise the handbooks. Teacher educators in these fields want to toss the edTPA and find something more suitable. Despite promises that changes were coming to these edTPAs, it’s been a case of too little too late (or nothing at all).

4.        Review certification exam costs and evaluate pass rate variations in different certification areas and across different student populations, as well as why they occur;

            There is absolutely no data on just how disastrous edTPA has been in terms of discouraging potential teacher candidates from continuing to pursue their goals of becoming  teachers. Everyone I speak to in my circle of teacher educators has multiple examples of people who gave up, in some cases even after finishing student teaching. It’s not just that the edTPA is daunting and hard to complete while meeting all the other demands of program completion. It is also that the costs are prohibitive, and many simply have to return to other kinds of full time employment. Once that happens, they just give up.

5.         Eliminate the Academic Literacy Skills Test, which duplicates other parts of the certification process;

            Hallelujah! I am praying everyone will agree this is the worst test on the planet. Goodbye ALST, you won’t be missed.

6.        Examine the Educating All Students exam for possible content problems and to assess variations in pass rates across certification areas;

            As Professor Devin Thornburg has pointed out, the EAS is riddled with ill-defined problems with no clear right answer. Instead, finding the right response is about identifying language use and assumptions being made in the wording of the question.

7.         Examine statewide discrepancies regarding the length and content of the student teaching experience.

            This is a problem that is not going to go away no matter what the Regents decide. Increasingly, people are moving into full time classroom teaching who are already working in education in various capacities, and it is challenging to figure out how to manage the requirements of student teaching, short of leaving their jobs altogether. That is not financially feasible for most people.

The Regents are meeting on Monday next week. You should temporarily stop calling and tweeting and emailing your senators and representatives, and get in touch with your Regents. Let them know your perspective on these proposed changes. Then, if there are proposed changes in the coming weeks open for public comment, it will be time to really make some noise.

Maybe you’d like to speak your mind on the question posed by Professor Alan Singer on Huffington Post this morning:

             Why keep edTPA at all?

Enrollment in teacher preparation programs statewide is tanking. Oh and there’s this: the Regents also moved to approve in 2017 budget priorities this line item:

Excessive Teacher Turnover Prevention Grant Expansion ----- $4 million

OK, let's go!
Need help with talking points? See UUP press release.

Higher Education Committee Members.

Find your representative.

UPDATE 2-12-17 More details from D'Agati here and here. 

A Bandage on a Wound

As they say, there's good news and bad news from Albany this week. The good news is that the Regents voted on an extension of teacher certification safety nets for the Content Specialty Tests as well as a change in the policy on the safety nets. 19 of the 41 CST exams have been revised, and another 14 are coming next month. It's no longer required to take the new exam, fail, and take and pass the old exam. The dates for extension of these safety net policies vary depending on the exam so be sure to read the fine print here. Good luck understanding some of the tangled jargon: 

This safety net for those previously revised CSTs will expire on June 30, 2017.  These safety nets will expire before the safety net for the newly revised tests (those being released in November 2016) because those students and institutions have already had time to prepare for the revised exams since those examinations will have been operational for over two years when the safety net expires.

It's appropriate that the metaphor here is a safety net because making your way through to certification is akin to a high wire trapeze act.

The bad news is that we still don't know what the outcome will be on the work of the edTPA task force, and our future teachers are still feeling the pain. Take 9 minutes and listen to the voices of these people at SUNY Oneonta and Hartwick College speaking to Regent Cashin and others at a recent forum.

The other bad news is that all that has really happened is the problems with the tests and the process of becoming a teacher in New York State have been kicked down the road without a vision for a real solution. Pearson continues to profit on problematic tests. Cuomo's victory in requiring a 3.0 GPA and normed test for admission to teacher education programs is still in place, and is still going to cause precipitous drops in enrollment. Legislative action is our only hope. Please, write to your representatives and Regents and implore them to do something. They have been listening, but they need your input and advice. 

Almost like being there?

Video is seductive technology. It’s used as click bait on social media, to advertise on the sides of buildings in Times Square, and even to help pass the time in the back seat of a New York City taxi. In education, video has tremendous potential to instruct, to inspire, to raise awareness, and more. It is making its way into teacher education as a tool for analyzing teaching. Despite its potential, I am concerned about some trends I am noticing, and that I believe deserve careful scrutiny.

For example, at Relay, the website boasts that its instructors are not “sitting in ivory towers” but coaching and mentoring students who are learning to become teachers. “When they’re not right there in the classroom, they’re side by side with our students, watching and analyzing video of them…pausing, rewinding and replaying the video to give pinpoint feedback.” They even call these videos “game film” as in show that you’ve got game in the classroom. Video is also used to instruct, and Relay’s site explains “our students can watch and rewatch course modules as they complete our program.” One of the students featured in a Relay video  even claims, “Film doesn’t lie.”

One of my concerns lies in the false sense of objectivity that is ascribed to videos of classroom life. Like it or not, the camera is a presence. You can’t be unaware of it, and it comes with its own interpretive lens even sitting on a tripod in the corner of the room. It is not reality, it is a representation of reality. What’s more, classroom events are often incredibly complex, and require deep contextual knowledge to fully understand and even interpret. I know from my own research in classrooms that when revisiting classroom events with participants using video there is a lot of unpacking to do about the teacher’s intentions and beliefs, the students’ understanding, and the shifts and gaps between what is captured in film and what is remembered by the people afterwards.

Another concern is that the temptation in observing teaching to satisfy a checklist of items you are looking for is exacerbated with video. We have been there, done that, and the behavioral checklist doesn’t work. It’s a bit like getting on a sightseeing bus, driving around a city, and saying you saw this and that. You caught a glimpse, grabbed a bad photo or two, but what did you really see? Not much. Using video to evaluate teaching is also problematic because the likelihood is that only a short clip will be analyzed, a tiny sliver of what classroom life is really like, and the evaluator will probably only watch once. It’s as if instead of going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, lingering over favorite paintings and talking with a friend about what you notice, like, appreciate, wonder about, and so on, and reading the contextual information provided by the curator, you watch a quick slideshow online where each image lasts for 15 seconds and you get the name of the artist and the title of the work on the bottom of the screen. It’s not likely that you will have a memorable and long-lasting experience.

What much of the video use in teacher education is intending to replace is the bothersome and expensive problem of actually being in the classroom. It is an acknowledged problem that full time faculty don’t generally supervise student teachers, and that the work is more often than not relegated to adjuncts and in large universities, to doctoral students. Principals are also hard pressed to find enough time to evaluate all the teachers in their schools, and rely on help from assistant principals and instructional coaches. Now that companies like EdThena are developing software to make it easy and intuitive to provide feedback on teachers’ videos, we are likely to see more and more remote evaluation. No one will remember anymore the value of being in the room, because teaching won’t be seen as relational work, but as a series of techniques to be micro-managed by data analysis and video software.

How is this creeping up on us? In preservice education, we are seeing how Pearson’s scoring of edTPA portfolios is micromanaged by very specific rubrics looking for particular instructional moves in video clips totaling approximately 15 minutes. This leads to some very problematic oversimplification as in this Powerpoint slide widely used to explain the rubric progression of edTPA scoring from one to five:

Why, for example, is a preservice teacher rewarded for a focus on individuals or flexible groups rather than on the whole class? This is a false dichotomy. There are plenty of classroom moments that call for the teacher to focus on the whole class. The danger of delineating “best practices” in this sense is then certain approaches and teaching moves become de-facto no-nos. The truth is there are times when it is appropriate to be letting students explore and do inquiry, and others when students require explicit step-by-step instructions from the teacher. In the new teacher education accreditation standards from CAEP we see that clinical supervision is using “technology-based applications” and “technology-enhanced learning opportunities” that are likely stand-ins for video analysis of teaching. The call for external evaluators in schools as in Governor Cuomo’s budget will likely be done by video (see p. 18 here that says observations may be live or recorded video) and will claim to have teacher and union support. For example, Public Agenda’s initiative Everyone at the Table (with funding from the Gates Foundation) seeks to involve teachers in evaluation reform. Teachers will be persuaded to buy-in to the idea of external evaluation by video because there is some truth to the problem that principals and peers are biased and can have favorites, and video evaluation is seen as more objective. But precisely because it offers less context, and comes with more narrow parameters (that checklist rears its ugly head again), it is more problematic.  

 Although a recent piece by NPR on professions that are likely to be automated in the coming decades  said college professors only had a 3.2% chance of that happening, there is an increasing possibility that a bleak future for unemployed former teacher educators will entail scraping together a measly income from scoring edTPA portfolios, doing supervision and teacher evaluation by video analysis, and putting together data analysis reports from software made by EdThena or other similar companies.